Apostate blames creationists

(But in reality, agrees with their biblical exegesis)

9 October 2000

From JC of the UK. His letter is yet another unsubstantiated attack on creationists. It also illustrates again how atheists will exploit the views of churchians who don’t believe in Genesis, but are really utterly contemptuous of such compromise. Finally, it illustrates that atheists cannot even complain consistently without plagiarizing concepts (e.g. rationality and honesty) from Christianity, because they cannot be logically deduced from consistent materialistic evolution. Dr Jonathan Sarfati, Creation Ministries International–Australia, responded with point-by-point responses interspersed and outdented. Ellipses (…) at the end of one of JC’s paragraphs signal that a mid-sentence comment follows, not an omission.

I used to be a Christian, …

What precisely do you mean? The word Christian, alas, has become so flexible, e.g. some people think it simply means someone who attends church for ‘hatch, match and dispatch’. After all, according to your own website, you married an atheist years ago, and admit that you weren’t ‘committed enough’ to follow God’s rules about marrying only another Christian (see Q&A: Family/Marriage Issues). And as you should expect because of our biblical stance, we believe that 1 John 2:19 applies to those who abandon their professed faith, no matter how weakly held.

… however for the past year I have been an Atheist. A key element in my de-conversion was seeing the dishonesty of creationist sites, including, to be frank, yours. I just don’t see why you or anyone else has to distort the facts …

Atheists commonly accuse us of dishonesty without documenting a single case. They probably resort to this smear because they have no reasonable response to the arguments.

… in support of a god who is supposed to strongly disapprove of lies and is also supposed to be omnipotent and therefore not need anyone to do anything on his behalf, let alone lie.

Indeed He does not approve of lying, so we are very careful to avoid dishonesty. Conversely, if we were nothing but rearranged pond scum, as atheistic evolution teaches, then what would be wrong with lying? Perhaps honesty is simply a particular form of molecular movement in the brain that conferred survival value? That’s another thing we never seem to receive from those who baselessly accuse us of dishonesty—the slightest justification from their atheistic perspective as to why such (alleged) dishonesty is wrong.

And this lack of an objective moral basis would explain why many anti-creationist sites are both dishonest and vicious, but I don’t see JC complaining about them!

I have learned that most Christian denominations repudiate the position which your organisation takes; indeed many argue that your organisation does serious damage to their cause, …

Do you really care? The only way you can consistently claim that you abandoned your professed Christianity because of creationist websites is if such websites truly were representative of Christianity. If not, then why abandon Christianity (however defined) if our site isn’t really representative? Also, I’m amazed that you can write this email when you agree on your website that all the compromise positions, including the Hugh Ross type (day-age) compromise critiqued in the URL you cite below, are ‘cop-outs’, and that the New Testament presupposes the literal truth of Genesis.

… by implying that a literal belief in what is clearly contrary to established consensus in numerous fields …

Is truth decided by ‘established consensus’? What a good thing that scientific greats like Newton, Semmelweis, Pasteur, Einstein, etc. didn’t simply accept the ‘established consensus’.

… is essential to their faith.

We never claim that one cannot be a Christian and an evolutionist, but point out the logical inconsistencies—which you agree with as shown on your website. This is one more example of the duplicity of atheistic anti-creationists—using the churchian compromisers much as Lenin used ‘useful idiots’ in the West to unwittingly undermine their own foundations. But out of the other side of their mouths, the atheists are utterly contemptuous of the compromisers who refuse to accept the plain teaching of the book they profess to believe.

Your response to them seems to be less than gracious, for example you refer to a publisher as ‘once-biblical’ (presumably an abusive description) because they happen to publish a book written by someone — a Christian — whom you disagree with.

No, a simple statement of fact, which you have done nothing to refute. In fact you agree with this anyway, as is amply shown on your website, e.g. ‘Given that so much of the rest of the Bible relies on these [Genesis Creation and the Flood] being true, in particular Romans 5 to 8 …’. Also, why should you care if you don’t believe the Bible anyway?

Also noticeable is that when you do publish responses from people you disagree with, you intersperse the responses with comments of your own twice as long as the original …

Why is this a problem? Would you deny us freedom of response? Or are you simply uncomfortable seeing your fellow believers in atheism thoroughly refuted? But in reality, we have often printed the critical email in entirety followed by printing it with our responses interspersed, so the critic is the one who effectively has double the exposure [editor’s note: to reduce file size and download times, we no longer print an email in its entirety in addition to the interspersed version].

… which is frequently displayed in green on a yellow background making it hard to read.

Please check again—it is our responses which are in green (a color I chose when backgrounds were white), while the critical letters are in black, and first appear alone. By your own reasoning, we are disadvantaging ourselves by making our response more difficult to read than the negative response [editor’s note: our website has been redesigned several times since this was originally published so this color scheme is no longer an adequate description, but we trust the points made are still discernable].

This is also an example of how short on substance some anti-creationists are in complaining about the tiniest things, not bothering to get their facts straight, and ignoring the possibility of a perfectly innocent explanation. What’s even worse are the skeptics’ churchian allies who uncritically believe what God-haters claim about creationists, without finding out our side first (cf.Proverbs 18:17).

It’s all too late for me; …

That is, ‘My mind’s made up, don’t bother me with the facts.’

daily I find myself wondering how I was ever taken in for so long by the whole bankrupt edifice of Christianity, …

So how do you know that you are now not simply in a passing phase of being taken in by the whole bankrupt edifice of atheism? And just how is Christianity ‘bankrupt’? I read your email carefully and I couldn’t find a single documented flaw in Christianity. And we have answers to those who claim to have refuted creation and Christianity in our Countering the Critics section.

… and perhaps your site does some good (from my point of view now) by helping others to see that.

If that were so, atheist/skeptic/humanist organisations wouldn’t oppose it as much as they do. But in reality, they realise that we are one of the main organisations undermining their ‘faith’, defending the Bible without compromise (as you admit yourself).

Conversely, the atheists aren’t threatened in the slightest by the churchian compromisers. You yourself are a perfect example of the result of such compromise—a professing Christian with a very weak foundation who apostatised.

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